Passengers aboard Train 917 recall chaos after the collision

Saturday

Commuter train passengers say they weren’t told what was happening after Tuesday’s crash. “There were faces smashed, glasses broken, bloody noses, cut lips,” Gary Rozenas of Brockton recalled. CLICK HERE to listen to the 9-1-1 calls made from the train.

Commuter train passengers say they weren’t told what was happening after Tuesday’s crash

At 5:15 p.m. Tuesday, 55-year-old Gary Rozenas of Brockton was relaxing inside MBTA commuter rail Train 917 out of South Station in Boston, reading a newspaper in a backward seat in the second car from the locomotive as he headed home from his job in a bank.

In the car traveling behind him sat 51-year-old Bob Hooper, an assistant administrator with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, dozing on his way home to Stoughton.

Next to him was his girlfriend, Tracey Seprinski, 48, a legal assistant with the Board of Bar Overseers.

And three cars from the rear, 48-year-old Len Berkowitz of Easton, who had left work early as a tax director for a financial services company because he wasn’t feeling well, was catching up with correspondence on his BlackBerry.

The four, who were among an estimated 300 passengers as the train approached Canton Junction that evening, were veterans of the daily commute. So when the train slowed to a stop, the change barely registered.

Sometimes they halted to give way to Amtrak. Other times, it was for a deer on the tracks. This time, engineer Ronald Gomes, 61, of Rehoboth, had a different problem.

Unbeknownst to the passengers, a 112-ton boxcar loaded with building materials had somehow begun rolling from a siding at a Stoughton lumber yard.

It picked up speed as it traveled three miles along the tracks directly into the path of Train 917, which it struck with force at 5:16 p.m.

Rozenas recalled “the most ungodly noise ... I can still hear the sound of the metal and the thud of it all.”

He banged his head and hurt his shin on the seat in front of him. The lights went out.

There was silence “so you could hear a pin drop,” followed by screaming and people asking one another, “Are you all right?”

“There were faces smashed, glasses broken, bloody noses, cut lips,” said Rozenas. “It was dark and confused. People were asking what the hell happened.

“Lots of people were standing in the aisle for the stop at Canton Junction. They went flying. There were briefcases, glasses, cell phones all over the floor.”

People began to pick themselves up, offering tissues and assistance.

In the car containing Hooper and Seprinski, blood was also flowing.

Hooper, who is 6 feet, 1 inch tall, was thrown onto the top of the seat in front of him. The impact opened a gash above his left eye and smashed his nose. Blood was streaming from his forehead and he felt tooth fragments loose inside his mouth.

Hooper checked to make sure Seprinski, his girlfriend, was OK. She, too, hit the seat in front of her, but the softer part.

“I couldn’t imagine what we had hit to have that kind of impact,” said Hooper. “I heard later we moved backward 47 feet.”

Berkowitz, riding closer to the back of the train and facing an empty seat, was thrown to the floor. He blacked out for a few seconds. When he came to, his elbow was stinging.

“It was surreal,” said Berkowitz. “It was horrific. I saw blood. I heard about broken noses and people losing teeth. People took spills in my train. We were closer to the back and better off for being there.”

When the freight car, owned by CSX, slammed into the commuter train, 150 passengers were injured. Investigators are focusing on a Stoughton lumberyard to find out how the freight car got loose.

“The primary focus of the investigation is whether the brake was ever set on the freight car,” Scott Farmelant, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Rail Co., said last week. “Initial reports indicate it was not set.”

The incident is under investigation, which could take nine months, federal officials said Friday.

Passengers in dark

Most striking to Berkowitz after the crash was the complete lack of information afterward. There were no announcements telling passengers what to do and no MBTA personnel walking through the cars.

Rozenas found himself three feet from a door that would not open, having jammed on impact. Spilled diesel fuel had ignited a patch of woods near the train and passengers could smell smoke.

“People started getting panicky, a little,” said Rozenas. “They were pulling the (emergency) gaskets and getting ready to jump out the windows when someone in the back of the car called out, ‘There’s a door open down here.’”

Rozenas said he and his fellow passengers jumped off the train, but they didn’t know where they were. They walked through woods and across a muddy field to an enclave of homes. Rescuers set up a treatment area in a nearby yard, but the media was kept away.

“If the cameras had been allowed in that lady’s yard, they would have captured people being dragged out of the woods, by their legs and arms, bloody,” said Rozenas. “Dazed, bleeding, blood-covered people staggering out of the woods.

“Living through it and hearing how the articles are in the paper, it’s only 2 percent of what went on and happened.”

Could be worse

Two images struck Hooper as he emerged from the train. One was a helicopter already hovering overhead to transmit news of the crash. The other was the long line of train passengers waiting to take photographs of the wreck with their cell phone cameras.

When MBTA buses arrived, Rozenas got on one bound for Stoughton. The driver, from Dorchester, didn’t know the way, so a woman sat up front to direct him. Rozenas arrived at Stoughton Center at 7:15 p.m. and drove home to Brockton.

A rail commuter for 25 years, he went back to work the next day on a half-empty train. The following day, the cars were full again.

Hooper and Seprinski decided to skip the triage area set up by rescuers. With a friend and fellow passenger, they walked to a main street, where the friend’s wife met them with her car and took them to Caritas Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton.

The emergency room was already crowded with train victims and extra workers were being called in, Hooper said. He received seven stitches to close the wound above his eye. It was 9:20 p.m. before he and Seprinski made it home.

“My left eye is completely black and blue. My nose could be broken,” said Hooper. “I chipped some teeth and had to have the dentist grind them down. My neck and back are very sore.”

Still, he was up at 5:15 a.m. the next day for the commute to Boston, which he’s made for 19 years.

Berkowitz climbed out of the train to realize he was only a quarter mile from Canton Junction, where he’d left his car in the morning. With other passengers, he walked back along the now-quiet tracks.

It took about 10 minutes to reach the parking lot for the ride home. A commuter for 15 years, Berkowitz also went to work the next day, but also visited his doctor, who told him he was “pretty lucky.”

“Everyone was just very fortunate that we were stopped,” said Hooper. “If we had been traveling at 30 or 40 miles per hour, this would’ve been more catastrophic, a story of national proportions.”

CLICK HERE to listen to the 9-1-1 calls made from the train.

Vicki-Ann Downing can be reached at vdowning@enterprisenews.com.

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